1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method and system for improving the response time of computer terminals interacting with mainframe hosts. In particular, a method and system for predicting which action key an end-user will be sending to the host are disclosed.
2. Background Information
The IBM 3270 architecture is widely implemented using various personal computer terminal emulators and host applications. Current host application technology uses 3270 formatted screens to provide the best end-user interfaces. Although structured and hierarchical, these applications can transmit in excess of 10,000 bytes of information to update the screen once. Adaptive compression techniques and intelligent protocols have been implemented to minimize the amount of time it takes to transmit one of these full screens. An inherent limitation in these techniques is that they "learn" the type of data likely to be sent, and provide only a minimal assistance when viewing "new" data. Thus, they are very useful when scrolling backwards through data already seen, but not helpful when scrolling forward through data that is unknown to the compressor.
It is desirable to provide a method and system for anticipating what data an end-user will be viewing next and automatically sending the predicted key sequence so that the data will be immediately available for display when desired. It is also desirable to have a synchronization scheme to allow transparent correction when a predicted key sequence that is sent to a host is not the actual key sequence selected by the user.